Drawing on an essay by Masayuki Takayama, this chapter critically examines how the Murayama Statement and the Kōno Statement were drafted, the role played behind them by the Foreign Ministry official Sakutaro Tanino, and the broader structure of the self-denigrating historical narrative imposed on postwar Japan.
Touching as well on the Great Hanshin earthquake and Tomiichi Murayama’s political conduct, it sharply portrays the essence of statement politics that undermined Japan’s sovereign right to interpret its own war.

2019-04-23
However, the man who wrote the Murayama Statement is known.
It was Sakutaro Tanino, a University of Tokyo graduate, a diplomat, and a former ambassador to China.
Two years before the Murayama Statement, this man had also drafted Yohei Kono’s statement recognizing the forced rounding up of comfort women.

This was a chapter I published on 2015-09-08.
Perhaps it is best to call him a man deeply versed in truths that can never be understood by subscribing to newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun.
It is a continuation of an essay by Masayuki Takayama, a man to whom the description “man of stern principle” fits perfectly.
From the lead essay in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument.
It is also an essay proving the correctness of what I myself wrote about Tomiichi Murayama.
Like me, most Japanese people must surely have come all the way to the present day without knowing any of the facts written here.

Continuation of the preceding passage.

There are people who call Tomiichi Murayama human trash.
Certainly, he had no fixed convictions.
A man who in his Socialist Party days said the Self-Defense Forces were unconstitutional and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty should be scrapped, the moment he accidentally became prime minister, changed to saying “the Self-Defense Forces are constitutional” and “the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty is wonderful.”
Even a daruma geisha would be astonished.
Still, another person says that calling him human trash goes too far.
That he must also have done some good work.
Half a year after he became prime minister, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake struck before dawn.
In Kobe, where the quake measured 7, highways and buildings collapsed, and fires attacked the city.
Tokyo was also at seismic intensity 1.
Murayama awoke and said, “I learned of it on television at 6 a.m.,” but that was a lie; he heard of it from his secretary at 7:30 a.m.
He seems to have thought it was nothing serious, and even when reporters asked him about earthquake countermeasures, he said nothing.
At noon, six hours after the outbreak, he was informed by the Chief Cabinet Secretary that there were “200 dead,” and only then was he startled.
There is no doubt that because of Murayama’s delay in the initial response, “two thousand citizens who need not have died were made to die” (Shintaro Ishihara).
Sometime after hearing that criticism, Husei Tanaka said in a tone almost of sympathy, “He wept, saying he had caused five thousand deaths.”
The total number of dead exceeded 6,400.
Even at that point, Murayama was still understating the death toll.
He was certainly slow, timid, and sly.
Even when Aum carried out the subway sarin attack, he remained bewildered and could not even apply the Subversive Activities Prevention Act.
A close aide says that this man, who failed in everything he did, at one point “decided he would become Weizsäcker.”
This German blamed the massacre of the Jews entirely on the Nazis, and after sophistically declaring that “German citizens too were victims of Hitler,” apologized for the “atrocities of the Nazis.”
What a thing to say.
If one looks at history, Germans had massacred Jews again and again even without Hitler.
Murayama thought that if he apologized here, his own name would remain, just like Weizsäcker’s.

Yesterday I wrote about the truly foolish way in which the Asahi Shimbun still keeps saying that Japan should learn from Germany.
As the other half of that posture, they repeatedly bring up Weizsäcker.
This essay also points to the very source from which those things arise.

Continuation of the preceding passage.

Thus, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, he issued the “Murayama Statement.”
That one saying that “Japan, through mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, and through colonial rule and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering to the peoples of Asian countries.”
When, who, and what mistaken national policy had been made, Murayama could not answer even when asked.
Asia had all been colonies of Europe and America.
So then, which Asian countries had Japan invaded.
Murayama could not answer that either.
With regard to such an uncertain statement based on a self-denigrating view of history, he secured cabinet approval with the threat, “Refuse it and you will be dismissed.”
That was Chief Cabinet Secretary Kosuke Nozaka.
At the fiftieth year after the war, just when the fetters of MacArthur’s postwar historical view were finally about to rot away, it was as though a new set of fetters had been attached.
As MacArthur himself acknowledged, the last war had been a war of self-defense for Japan.
Under international law, sovereign states are recognized as having the right to interpret their own wars, yet Murayama arbitrarily threw away that right and publicly declared in the name of the prime minister, “That was not self-defense. It was a war of aggression.”
Twenty years later the Abe administration deleted this mistaken assertion, but no matter how much one might wish to leave one’s name behind, the folly of degrading one’s own country is not something that can be forgiven in a human being.
So after all, “Murayama is human trash” may be the correct answer.
Still, the mystery remains as to who flattered and made dance this man with defects in his thinking.
However, the man who wrote the Murayama Statement is known.
It was Sakutaro Tanino, a University of Tokyo graduate, a diplomat, and a former ambassador to China.
Two years before the Murayama Statement, this man had also drafted Yohei Kono’s statement recognizing the forced rounding up of comfort women.
It is said that the adjustment with the South Korean government was also his doing.
After retirement, this man who spreads disaster widely among the people was involved in auditing Toshiba.
And thus he helped bring about fraudulent window-dressed accounting that could have destroyed Toshiba.
A strange sort of being that lodges only in human trash.
To be continued.